Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Long Hope :: Solvitur Acris Hiems :: I:4

This ode is addressed to Lucius Sestius, whowas appointed consul suffectus in 23 BC by Augustus (even though Sestius had fought in the republican ranks against the emperor . . . alongside Horace, I might add).

This beautifully constructed ode begins with the loosening of winter’s grip upon the land at the coming of spring. It ends with a reminder about the shortness of life and the fate that awaits us all.

I have a different take from most scholars on some of the lines in this ode. For instance, take line 15:

vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

According to Jeffrey Kaimowitz in his excellent The Odes of Horace (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), it means:

lifes’s brief span forbids us to enter hope far-reaching

A translation by the poet Ernest Dowson [1867–1900], who gave us ‘days of wine and roses’ and ‘gone with the wind,’ is everywhere on the web:

The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long

A French translation has:

le cours de la vie est bref et

nous défend les longues espérances

I suppose that I might agree with these translations. Summa can mean all of these things: span, sum, and course [cours]. But what if summa means, as it can, ‘height,’ ‘chief point,’ ‘perfection’? Wouldn’t this make more sense? The ode is about spring. Spring doesn’t last forever. There will be summer and fall and winter and death. It is the high point of life—youth—that is brief, surely. So I translate this line as:

The pinnacle of brief life

stops us from hoping

that it will be long.

But there are more problems with this line. Does brevis modify summa or vitae? Does longam modify spem or is it a noun meaning ‘a long one,’ referring to life? And if longam does modify spem, what does ‘long hope’ mean? In ode I:11, Horace talks about pruning back long hope:

spem longam reseces

And in III:21, he talks about reducing it:

tu spem reducis

Clearly, to Horace, hope has the dimension of length; whereas, in English, its dimension is one of magnitude: great white hope, great expectations, big hopes. Hope is often in the plural in English. Moreover, hope is something that we can build upon. We say ‘she built her hopes on his return.’

This allusion to building is interesting, too, because in today’s ode, Horace uses the verb incohare with spem longam. Incohare means ‘to start’ or ‘to lay the foundation of a building.’

Slowly, painfully, things are starting to make sense. Literally (and awkwardly) line 15 must read:

The short pinnacle of life stops us

from laying down long hope.

Idiomatically, from an English point of view, line 15 must read:

The short pinnacle of life stops us

from building up great hopes.

Other nettlesome lines are the last two:

nec tenerum Lycidan mirabere, quo calet iuventus [19]

nunc omnis et mox virgines tepebunt

Most take these lines to mean:

and you won’t look at tender Lycidas,

for whom all the boys are burning

now, and soon the girls will be warm.

I suppose that scholars see a kind of parallelism here. If the girls are warm, then it stands to reason that iuventus, [youth, young persons] must mean boys. And given the sexual mores of Roman society, why not? But I don’t see the parallelism. Instead, I take iuventus to mean ‘the age of youth.’ Like spring, youth heats up the body, and it won’t be long before the girls are warmed by this tender boy named Lycidas.

and you won’t look at tender Lycidas,

in whom youth now burns entirely,

and soon the girls will be warm.

My interpretation depends upon two things. First, omnis, with its short i to fit the meter, could mean 'completely, entirely.' Second, quō is the ablative of quī and can mean ‘by whom.’ But ablatives can also express location, as in this line from Virgil:

Celsā sedet Aeolus arcō

Aeolus is seated on a high citadel.

Or ablatives can express what grammarians call ‘respect or specification,’ as in this line from Horace:

Ex corde et genibus tremit.

He trembles both in heart and knees.

If this is what Horace meant by the ablative of quō, then perhaps my interpretation is correct.

4 comments:

Fascinating: illustrative of how complex translation (of poetry) can be. But from a non-academic point of view poetry has meaning when it speaks directly to the reader: one is moved or not, and being moved is all.

Thank you for your comment. Translation is pretty much impossible. I try to stay as close as possible to what I think Horace is saying, but, in the end, all I can hope to do is put in English what I felt as I read the poem in Latin.